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A new report on vulnerabilities in the US power grid sheds stark light on our ability to deal with certain kinds of threats. A coronal mass ejection of an equivalent magnitude to the one that hit the Earth in 1859 would cripple our infrastructure today, with some areas losing power for up to two years.

Plans to build a test track for a Hyperloop are moving ahead. Hyperloop Technologies will build a major test center near Las Vegas to explore linear electric motor designs and evaluate its implementation.

It is exceedingly hard to find an angle that presents The Interview in a positive light — and yet, of course, Sony Pictures’ marketing department has managed to do just that. Yesterday, four days after the film’s release on YouTube, Google Play Movies, and Xbox Video, The Interview became Sony’s ‘#1 online film of all time,’ grossing $15 million from sales and rentals. In other news, however, it would appear, rather ironically, that Sony used a popular K-pop song without permission of artist.

After years of relentless litigation, it seems the mobile/smartphone patent war might be drawing to a close. Rockstar, a patent trolling company owned by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson, and BlackBerry, has agreed to cancel the lawsuits it had filed against Google and most Android device makers. This follows on from news this summer that Apple and Google had agreed to drop all lawsuits between the two companies, and Apple and Samsung agreed to drop all lawsuits outside the US.

Google has unveiled the first fully working road-legal prototype of its self-driving car. If all goes to plan, Google hopes to partner with a real car maker to bring a self-driving vehicle to market in the next five years. Whether the commercialized driverless car will look like the overly cutesy Google prototype remains to be seen.

Yesterday evening, North Korea was unceremoniously knocked off the internet by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This comes shortly after the US government promised a ‘proportional response’ to the Sony Pictures hack, which the FBI believes was carried out by North Korea. While it would be rather funny if the US government was responsible for taking North Korea off the internet, it’s more likely to be the actions of some disgruntled hacktivists such as Anonymous or Lizard Squad.

Way back in the summer of 2013, SpaceX’s Elon Musk proposed a new transportation system that was equal parts awesome and insane: The Hyperloop. Unfortunately, that was the extent of Musk’s involvement: He gave us his plans in the form of a 57-page white paper, and then told the world to go ahead and build it. Now, a group of 100-odd engineers have banded together to try and actually create a Hyperloop — and they seem to be making pretty solid progress.

For the past five years, Microsoft has been forced to offer first-time Windows users in Europe a choice of web browser. This was a result of an EU ruling in 2009, which found that Microsoft had been unfairly abusing its operating system monopoly to push Internet Explorer into the hands of millions of unwitting, unfortunate users. Now, however, Microsoft is once again free to make Internet Explorer the default web browser in Windows.

New details from the Sony hack have shown that the MPAA hasn’t learned from years of defeat over DNS blocking. The organization is still investigating whether it can compel this kind of action — despite technical opinions that doing so would compromise the Internet’s function.

The debate over net neutrality got a touch more heated this week as IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm collectively asked the government not to invoke Title II — i.e the common carrier provision — in an attempt to enforce net neutrality. In a joint letter to Congress and the FCC itself, the companies collectively argue that proposed regulation under Title II would damage corporate competitiveness, network upgrades, and the overall customer experience. Unfortunately, they’re wrong.

Earlier in the year, the US Navy deployed its first combat-ready laser weapon system in the Persian Gulf — and now, after some field testing, we have a glorious video of the laser being used to blow up (unmanned) boats and drones. I’m happy to report that laser weapons are as awesome as you may have hoped.

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